On the basis of the lexical corpus created by Amano and Kondo (2000), using the Asahi newspaper, the present study provides frequencies of occurrence for units of Japanese phonemes, morae, and syllables. Among the five vowels, /a/ (23.42%), /i/ (21.54%), /u/ (23.47%), and /o/ (20.63%) showed similar frequency rates, whereas /e/ (10.94%) was less frequent.… (More)

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with ditransitive… (More)

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation paradigm. To shed… (More)

In an examination of the time course of activation of phonological and semantic information in processing kanji script, two lexical decision experiments were conducted with native readers of Japanese. Kanji targets were preceded at short (85-msec) and long (150-msec) intervals by homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated primes presented in kanji… (More)

The present study investigated the effects of phrase length and scrambling in the processing of Japanese sentences. Reading times of short phrases, long phrases, verbs, and whole sentences, measured by the method of self-paced reading, did not differ in terms of phrase-length order and scrambling. In addition, four types of sentences constructed on the… (More)

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of… (More)

The present study investigates the relationship between of Japanese kanji strokes and their printed-frequencies of occurrence, compositional asymmetry and kanji multiple readings. First, distributions of kanji strokes in both samples of the 1,945 basic kanji and of 6,355 kanji appearing in the Asashi Newspaper published between 1985 and 1998 followed a… (More)

Recent research has put forward the idea that Chinese speech production is governed by the syllable as the fundamental phonological unit. However, it may be that onset priming might be more difficult to obtain in Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, in this study, the degree of overlap between prime and target was increased from C to CV (i.e., extending beyond the… (More)